Editor’s note: This article was originally written for High Country News. To read the full article, click here.

Last April, in a narrow mountain valley in northwestern Colorado, Cristina Eisenberg was searching for scat. The biologist and two members of her field crew had set up a kilometer-long transect through elk habitat.

It was a raw day, cold and windy with spells of freezing rain, and the biologists had been moving through meadows for hours, looking for signs of elk, deer, coyote, and mountain lions, through their droppings. This was old-fashioned wildlife biology — hardly glamorous work — but in it lay the story of the landscape, of the pursuers and the pursued.

Finally, on the edge of an aspen grove, one of the biologists spotted a banana-sized scat, perhaps two months old. Eisenberg had seen thousands of droppings like this one, but not here, not in Colorado. Everything about it indicated a creature that had been extirpated from the state more than 70 years ago. Everything about it said wolf.

Within an hour and a half, the crew found a similar scat, some 500 yards away. Later that day, in another aspen grove about 5 miles away, there were two more. Less than a week later, Eisenberg’s lead tracker, Dan Hansche, found a wolf-like scat with a similar, smaller dropping laid on top — suggesting, Eisenberg says, that an adult wolf had been teaching its pup to mark territory.

As the weather warmed last summer, the field crew found 11 more wolf-like scats, and Hansche documented a set of tracks with wolf characteristics. Then, at dawn on July 27, Eisenberg and another biologist spotted a black shape running across an alfalfa field, perhaps 100 yards away. The stance, the gait and the set of the ears all suggested the wolves Eisenberg had spent so much time observing near her home in northwestern Montana.

This past November, during another trip to her Colorado study area, she found another set of wolf-like tracks, fresh prints that extended at least a quarter-mile up a snowy ranch road. All in all, Eisenberg and her crew found some 18 separate signs of wolf activity during visits over a seven-month period. This animal — or animals — was no mere passerby.

Officially, wild wolves do not live in Colorado. The nearest established population is in Wyoming, where gray wolves were introduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. But rumors of wolf sightings abound in Colorado, and in recent years, at least two wolves have died in the state.

Like most scientists, Eisenberg and her colleagues are cautious. For months, they half-jokingly spoke of “visitors from the north,” reluctant to name a species as controversial as the gray wolf. They emphasize that DNA testing, now underway at the University of California Los Angeles, is needed to back up their identification.

When wolves arrive in an ecosystem, everything changes: the ecology, the politics, and relationships both animal and human. “We know more about wolves, and the management of wolves, than we do about many other forms of wildlife,” says Douglas Smith, leader of the Yellowstone wolf project. “But we rarely get to put it into practice, because people flat-out freak out when a wolf shows up.”

Wolves herald a grand experiment — and in Colorado, that experiment may already be underway.

* * *

The chunk of northwestern Colorado where Eisenberg works is the High Lonesome Ranch. Bordered on the south by I-70 and on the west by the rippling shale and sandstone curtain of the Book Cliffs, it encompasses desert flats, river valleys and high-elevation aspen stands. With the recreation, outfitting and grazing permits it holds on Bureau of Land Management land adjoining its property, the ranch operates on a roughly circular 300 square miles — an area larger than Lake Powell at full pool.

“It’s an overwhelming landscape,” says Eisenberg, who, with conservation biologist Michael Soule, flew over the ranch in a helicopter last May. “Even from the air, practically everything you can see is the ranch. You think, ‘How are we ever going to measure this?’ “

Paul Vahldiek Jr. is the president, CEO and chairman of the board of High Lonesome Ranch. Vahldiek, a Houston trial lawyer, began the purchase of what would become High Lonesome in 1994. From the start, Vahldiek wanted to protect the land for the long term, so he set about learning how to be a good steward. The ranch sits in the gas-rich Piceance Basin, but Vahldiek cut off oil and gas company access to mineral leases. He decided to run 400 head of cattle, a fraction of the number permitted by the BLM.

He funded a ranch-wide biodiversity survey by scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. And he recently hired a firm of architects and planners to come up with a conservation plan.

Two years ago, Vahldiek sold minority shares in the ranch to several partners. Today, the official mission statement for the High Lonesome describes a “model of sustainability” that maintains biodiversity and open space while allowing a mix of uses — primarily ranching and recreation — for its financial support. But in the midst of all his activity, Paul noticed that in the high reaches of the ranch, in the aspen stands, something was wrong. The trees were dying, and there were few young sprouts to replace them.

* * *

Biologists have long recognized the power of predators in ecosystems. In the 1930s, Aldo Leopold, who advocated wolf extirpation early in his career, began to realize that the killing of predators had helped create what he called “the modern curse of excess deer and elk.” In 1980, ecologist Robert Paine coined the term “trophic cascades” to describe the ripple effects of predators on herbivores, and herbivores on plants.

Researchers find these top-down effects at work throughout the natural world: Predators ranging from mountain lions to otters to sea stars have dramatic impacts on the ecosystems they inhabit.

Eisenberg has spent the past four years gathering data for a dissertation on the effects of wolves on elk, aspen and songbirds in Glacier and Waterton Lakes national parks. It’s a demanding study that has brought her face-to-face with wolf dens, wolf kills, and, of course, wolf scat. In 2007, Eisenberg spoke about her work and about trophic cascades to an audience that included Paul Vahldiek.

Vahldiek wasn’t the only one seeing trouble in the aspen stands: Foresters throughout the Rocky Mountains had reported unusually rapid and widespread aspen die-offs, and, like Vahldiek, they’d noticed that young trees were scarce. By 2006, close to 150,000 acres of Colorado aspen were dead or damaged, according to aerial surveys. By 2008, the damaged areas exceeded half a million acres.

Researchers blame the die-off — now known as Sudden Aspen Decline — on a combination of culprits, including insects and diseases emboldened by drought and higher temperatures. But elk, which love to munch on tender aspen shoots, may also play a role in the trees’ troubles, both recent and long-term. As Vahldiek listened to Eisenberg, he began to wonder if the aspen on his ranch could use a few more predators.

Vahldiek invited Eisenberg to visit the High Lonesome, then asked her to propose a study of aspen, elk and predators on his property. He and his partners would fund it.

Though Eisenberg knew of the recent wolf sightings, both rumored and confirmed, in Colorado, she assumed the animals were transients. But as she and her field crew started searching the ranch’s meadows and aspen stands for scat, she realized Colorado might already have a new resident predator.

* * *

It’s easier for a wolf to get from Yellowstone to Colorado than it might sound. “Wolves are just driven to travel,” says Douglas Smith, the Yellowstone wolf biologist. “For them, it really isn’t a big deal.” While wolves are wary of humans, they are able to pass through developed landscapes.

The risks are high, as the deaths of the two radio-collared wolves in Colorado demonstrate. But the potential rewards — wide-open territory, abundant prey — are enormous.

No matter what left the scat and tracks on the High Lonesome Ranch, wolves are likely to keep venturing into Colorado. Wolves from Idaho and Montana began showing up in eastern Oregon and Washington at least a decade ago, and now both states have breeding pairs of wolves. Utah has confirmed six sightings since 1994, but no evidence of breeding wolves.

The wolf populations in Idaho and Montana, along with wolves in eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and northeastern Utah, were taken off the federal endangered species list last April. But wolves that wander into Colorado are considered endangered species, and their management is led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

For a wandering wolf hoping to settle down, Colorado offers habitat — and prey. Independent wildlife biologist Carlos Carroll says the state could support a population of at least 1,000 wolves. Carroll says that a wolf population would depend largely on three disjunct swaths of public land in western Colorado: one in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, one southwest of Aspen, and one in the Flattop Mountains, just northeast of the High Lonesome Ranch.

But the protection of wolves on private land requires the presence of another notable species: rural landowners with a soft spot for predators. “Wolves can live pretty much anywhere people will allow them to live,” says Shane Briggs, wildlife conservation programs supervisor for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. “The real questions for managing wolves aren’t biological — they’re social and political.”

Michelle Nijhuis of Paonia (michelle@hcn.org) is a contributing editor for High Country News.

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